We all deplore reckless or drunk driving, but timid drivers, I feel, are the worst of all. By this I mean slow, overly cautious, indecisive, scared of the shadow of their own car. Any way you slice it they’re infuriating. One of the glorious things about rumble-hogging is that I can easily go around these stooges. But sometimes they get you anyway.

The night before last I making a left turn at a traffic-lighted intersection on Fountain Ave., which is a four-laner. The light was green so people behind me were good to pass. My left-turn signal was on, of course, and I was positioned as far as possible on the left side of the left lane. Nonetheless a white coupe (Accord or Jetta) behind me was stopped, seemingly waiting for me to make my turn before proceeding. And of course three or four or five cars were also stopped behind him/her. All because the Accord/Jetta was too chicken to make a move. All this lily-livered driver (and the drivers behind him/her) had to do was swerve very slightly to the right, which would have been simple because, as noted, I wasn’t blocking the lane but sitting on top of the double line. Plus the Fountain Avenue traffic was mild with openings here and there. But the Accord/Jetta just sat there.

Par for the course. Timid drivers slow things down and make many of us crazy. Sometimes people get so impatient that they wind up making a mistake and then wham. Not that this has ever happened to me but still.

Twitter assaults are unfortunately par for the course if you write any kind of opinionated column. The toxicity is such these days that you’re almost certainly doing something wrong if you don’t get hated on now and then. So I’m used to slings and arrows. But once in a blue moon and in a weak moment I’ll temporarily succumb to a fantasy in which I’m Jake LaMotta destroying Tony Janiro. But it never lasts for more than a few seconds. Because of I always think of that moment in Barry Lyndon when Ryan O’Neal is coolly shunned by a certain fellow of wealth and position after that concert recital in which he beat the hell out of Leon Vitali in front of several powdered-wig guests.

When I posted yesterday’s “Loathsome Windreaker” thing (i.e., Stanley Kubrick‘s repulsive olive-drab-plus-orange thermal hoodie) I’d forgotten that I posted a similar riff last June called “Dress Sense vs. Directorial Expertise.” It was basically about how genius-level directors seem indifferent to fashion or style, and that “being a terrible dresser is more the rule than the exception.”

In that 6.19.19 piece I described director-writer Robert Eggers as he appeared after the first screening of The Lighthouse in Cannes — “jerkwad sneakers, white socks, shiny black chinos with cuffs above the ankle, an oversized Target sweatshirt and a dorkmeister whitewall haircut.”

It struck me this morning that, of course, like the always-ahead-of-his-time Kubrick, Eggers is a normcore guy — an embracer of bland, suburban anti-fashion attire.

A female tangent of normcare is menocore. The term came from a 2018 Man Repeller piece.

“Normcore is a little dated but still relevant,” Jett says. “My best friend’s girlfriend is very normcore. She wears cheap-looking golf attire when going out on the town. but it also has something to do with some women preferring baggy clothes as a kind of ‘fuck u to the patriarchy’ [statement]…like Billie Eilish does. Which I guess is noble as long as they can appreciate clothes on a basic level.”

For decades I’ve had this thing about big silver-looking coins jingling around in my pocket. JFK half dollars, Eisenhower “silver” dollars. For a couple of years in the late ‘90s a couple of actual silver dollars from the 1920s had joined the party. (Then I lost them.) The sound of them, how they feel, the weight…these relatively meaningless coins make me feel the alpha. Probably because they’re remnants of the past. Yeah, that’s it.

Or is that a bad idea because the Bumblefucks don’t care for Warren, and never have? I’d feel pretty good about this ticket — she’s obviously been more assertive than Biden about pushing for basic re-orderings of how things work. But what voters really want isn’t so much Bernie Lite as a return to decency.

I’ve always loved the ring of McCoy Tyner. It conveyed a certain fierceness or down-low intensity that always made me sit up and pay attention. If not a jazz pianist he would (or should) have been a baseball player. (A pitcher, I’m thinking.). Or a novelist. Or a Zane Grey gunslinger from the late 1890s. Great name.

I’m down with Home Before Dark because it stars The Florida Project‘s Brooklyn Prince. Logline: “A plucky, highly intelligent nine-year-old girl follows in her father’s footsteps by becoming a dogged crime reporter as she goes to work on a long-buried cold case.” The Apple streaming series (debuting on 4.3) is written and executive produced by Russel Friend and Garrett Lerner alongside showrunners Dana Fox and Dara Resnik. Jon Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In The Heights) directed the first episode.

Olive drab plus bright orange…the outdoor color combo from hell. For roughly 20 years Stanley Kubrick wore this same awful, warm-weather, bundle-up hoodie, all through Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut.

Apparel-wise Kubrick never seemed to give a damn. He always dressed with a minimum of fuss and a general aversion to fashion or even style (except perhaps “workaholic nerd style”). From the late ’50s to early ’70s he wore the same dark blue suit and white shirt. And then, sometime after A Clockwork Orange, came the olive-drab hoodie.

I’ ve hated the sight of this damn jacket for decades, and I just wanted to finally say it out loud. You could almost say (i.e., not really) that on a certain level I’ve never forgiven Kubrick for this aesthetic offense. If he had worn a dark blue windreaker with wolf fur, I would have been fine with that.

There’s nothing to prevent the one-time-only SXSW Streaming Film Festival from happening. It would be difficult but not impossible to set everything up in less than a week, and certainly worth a try. One of the major streamers needs to step up to the plate and say “let’s do this, Janet and John Pierson…let’s make it happen.”

I don’t know what I’d do if I was Jason Bateman‘s character, Marty Byrde. I’d probably spend half my time dreaming about what faraway tropical haven I could escape to, and the other half debating which method of suicide would be preferable. What a churning cauldron of greed and malice, and in a Missouri hellscape yet. Bumblefuck agony. Season 3 will deliver ten episodes, starting on 3.27.20.